Musgrave Concerto for Orchestra, Concertos for Clarinet, and Horn

SRCD253

£14.99

Details

Scottish-born but US-resident,Thea Musgrave has composed in almost every genre yet has managed to conduct her creative career with remarkable singleness of purpose – and with highly varied and wholly fruitful results that have been greeted with success, and indeed affection, by audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. She studied at Edinburgh University with Hans Gál as one of her teachers and by 1970 Musgrave was Guest Professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and since 1972 she has resided in the U.S.A., holding a number of prestigious teaching positions.

Like many composers of her generation in Britain – the generation that first began to attract notice in the middle 1950s – Thea Musgrave came of age musically in that ‘rite of passage’ which involved acknowledging the primary importance of Bartók and the Second Viennese School, and thus the rejection of tonality as traditionally conceived, along with its traditional expressive and form-building functions. Musgrave’s whole artistic progress to a greater degree than most of her contemporaries – was the need to discover new means of dramatizing the structure and musical argument of each work.

Reviews

"Three resounding cheers for the appearance on CD at last of the three Thea Musgrave concertos...some of the most convincing and thrilling orchestral pieces that have been written anywhere in the last few decades." Anthony Burton, BBC Music Magazine "This is one of the most important discs in the current wave of Lyrita issues, a must for anyone interested in British composers of the post-Britten generation." Mike Wheeler, clasicalsource.com *** PENGUIN GUIDE 2010